In 1989, a local Seattle news program ran a prank news bulletin by comedy group “Almost Live,” announcing that the Space Needle had collapsed. Panic ensued. Are there other examples of similar April Flops?
How did they ever think a building collapse was going to be a knee-slapper? 
Maybe for a building commonly considered ugly, it would be funny to say aliens took it (de gustibus and all that), or something like a radio tower suddenly falling over in an empty field might be funny in a Funniest Home Videos/FailArmy way.
Well, the (supposed) humor in that was that it was designed to be so obviously fake. But apparently putting “April Fools Day” as the date line on the top of the screen was not enough.
Does anyone have any personal stories about bad jokes you lived through yourself?
When someone who isn’t me lived in Philadelphia and was in a fight with the apartment management people (which someone who isn’t me eventually won), some BIO-HAZARD INFECTIOUS WASTE red bags were procured. The red bags were filled with crumpled-up newspaper and placed in the apartment dumpster on April first.
Hilarity ensued.
This year, as winter loosened its grip and the snow began to recede to reveal the familiar spring blooms of garbage and dog shit, I decided i would be part of the solution: I would collect trash from around the neighborhood whenever I emptied the dog. Phase one of my plan was to acquire the proper equipment: a trigger stick picky uppy thingy, and a roll of biohazard bags.
Look, I can’t help it–I majored in Performance Art at SAIC. 
It wasn’t for April Fool’s but one night my brother the pain in the ass pissed me off so much that I rigged up the old bucket of water perched atop a door gag. Unfortunately, in my state of being tired and pissed off, I forgot about the family dog. She opened the door before my brother did. I can still hear Mom telling Dad, “Somebody tried to play a trick on somebody.”
I shared this story of how I managed to prank myself one April Fool’s Day in the other AFD thread:
From this morning’s CNN. Coincidence, or juvenile corporate humor?
I woke up to 4" of snow this morning, so I guess Mother Nature got me.
Revisiting the 1989 video of the Space Needle “prank,” I suggest that, one: if the prank is big enough that you need to enclose the word “prank” in quotation marks, you should, two: pause a moment and imagine the possible reactions of people who don’t get it. Because there will be people who don’t get it. So it’s probably best to avoid a realistic sounding disaster, like a collapsing tower, and stick to scenarios that are so outrageous that no one could possibly think it’s real, like hostile Martians with death rays landing in a field in New Jersey.
Right, because even the Martians want to avoid the traffic.
I joked with a number of my clients today that the snow was part of an elaborate April Fools Day joke.
All right, Mother Nature, we got the joke. You can stop snowing now.
What I don’t get is, it’s called the “Space Needle”. How is the joke not “Space Needle finally succeeds in launching to Mars!”, with lots of back story about how funding was reduced after Apollo, so it took many more years than originally planned? Have a quote from someone, “It was so far behind schedule, some people started thinking it would actually be a permanent part of the cityscape!”
Back when I was a kid, Mom’s favorite day was April Fools. She pranked all of us and even got us involved in pranking each other and using the time we were occupied to have someone else prank us.
Jane, quick, run out and hide your dad’s lunch under his seat while I put a can of dogfood in his lunch box. I run out and Mom quickly puts wax paper in the middle of the sandwiches she was making for me, while sister changes other sister’s (there were 4 of us) sheets to give her an excuse to short sheet them.
This was a yearly thing, it was great.
The best prank Mom ever did was to not prank my sister. She was 20 at the time and living a few blocks away. Sister and son blew up balloons to fill my car, they helped do something to Dad, they knew what Mom was doing to the other sister and spent the rest of the day tiptoeing around and checking every door before it was opened, looking under seat cushions and just knowing that something was going to happen.
I never told sister that Mom had forgotten her, I told her that Mom did that on purpose to keep her looking all day. Then I told Mom, and she agreed with me. That’s the story and we are sticking to it!
Years ago, I was doing some field service work at a cargo terminal at O’Hare airport. This was one where relatively smaller cargo items were transferred to and from the airline. There were things like fresh cut flowers and seafood. They had a rack holding rolls of large decals to put on boxes. One of my biggest regrets was not grabbing a few each of the HUMAN REMAINS and LIVE ANIMALS stickers. Imagine the missed pranks!
They were actually transferring a corpse while I was there. A hearst backed up and loaded in what appeared to be a plain (save for some of the stickers) white cardboard box, a little smaller than a typical casket. I can’t remember how they lifted it.
*nitpick----“hearse”, not “hearst.”
Could have been a Hearst. You weren’t there.